Page 123 of Thorne
"Four minutes if nothing goes wrong." My fingers find the keyboard. "Longer if it does."
I begin.
The authentication sequence first. The same sequence I used a thousand times when I was building ASHFALL, when I imagined I was creating something elegant instead of something monstrous. My fingers move across the keys with muscle memory I didn't know I still had.
Authentication accepted.
The screen shifts. The command interface opens.
I start typing the framework. The recursive architecture. The mathematical trap that will make Phoenix eat itself.
Line one. The initialization protocol.
Line two. The handshake parameters.
Line three. The loop entry point.
"Perimeter's holding." Whisper's voice crackles through the comms. "No movement on external sensors."
"Copy." Thorne doesn't take his eyes off the door. "Keep us posted."
Line four. Line five. Line six.
The code scrolls across the screen. Each line is a piece of the trap. The mathematics that will teach Phoenix to think in circles, to process the unsolvable, to consume itself trying to find an answer that doesn't exist.
Line twelve. Line thirteen. Line fourteen.
"Movement." Whisper's voice cuts through. "Eastern perimeter. Four tangos."
"Fuse, Torque. Intercept." Ghost's voice. Calm. Controlled.
Gunfire. Distant, muffled by the concrete walls.
I keep typing.
Line nineteen. Line twenty. Line twenty-one.
"They know we're here." Thorne's weapon swings toward the sound of combat. "Phoenix must have detected the input."
"It can't stop me." My fingers don't slow. "Once I'm in the system, it has to process what I give it. That's how ASHFALL works. That's how I designed it."
Line twenty-six. Line twenty-seven.
The lights flicker.
Not the server room lights. The emergency lights in the corridor beyond. Something shifts in the building's infrastructure. A deep mechanical groan, like the facility itself is waking up.
"What was that?" Thorne's weapon swings toward the door.
I check the terminal. My code is still entering. But something else is happening now: something in the facility's environmental systems.
"Fire suppression." My blood goes cold. "Phoenix is activating fire suppression."
"We're not on fire."
"It doesn't matter." I keep typing. Line twenty-nine. Line thirty. "Halon systems. They don't extinguish fires with water. They displace oxygen. Starve the fire of air."
"Starve us of air."
